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Sunday 26 July 2026
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for what we mean by Science Fiction; here for the masthead; here for some Statistics; here for the Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Waite, Olivia
(? - ) US author, mostly of nonfantastic queer romances, though some may be defined as paranormals. She is of sf interest for Murder by Memory (2025), a detection set on a Generation Starship; Dorothy Gentleman, the lady-detective protagonist of the tale who narrates, whose personhood, having been stored in the ship's Library, has been awakened into a strange body, and ...
Bynner, Edwin Lassetter
(1842-1893) US historical author whose The Chase of the Meteor and Other Stories (coll 1891) presents for a young audience various fantastical tales, most notably the Flatland story "A Cruise in a Soap Bubble", which takes off from Edwin A Abbott's Flatland (1884). [JC]
SFinks
Polish Semiprozine – so described by its founder Wojtek Sedeńko – devoted to Fantastika; first published from Olsztyn in Autumn 1994. [See also Publishing history below.] Conceived as a Polish analogue of the trade journal Locus, this was initially a quarterly carrying nonfiction content such as bibliographic listings, publisher and author profiles, ...
Leach, Decima
(? - ) Author, presumably UK and perhaps pseudonymous, who is known only for her sf novel The Garthians (1962). [JC/DRL]
Mace, Elisabeth
(1933- ) UK author of Young Adult novels, of which several are of sf interest. The Leven sequence – comprising Ransome Revisited (1975; vt Out There 1975) and The Ruston Inheritance (1978) – is set in a depopulated Ruined-Earth environment, initially in an isolated dictatorial enclave in the UK, from which the young protagonists escape; the second ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book ...